The universe became a disc of light that shrank slowly until it was a pinpoint.

Then it went out.

17

1943 (III)

‘Will you marry me?’ said Volodya Peshkov, and held his breath.

‘No,’ said Zoya Vorotsyntsev. ‘But thank you.’

She was remarkably matter-of-fact about everything, but this was unusually brisk even for her.

They were in bed at the lavish Hotel Moskva, and they had just made love. Zoya had come twice. Her preferred type of sex was cunnilingus. She liked to recline on a pile of pillows while he knelt worshipfully between her legs. He was a willing acolyte, and she returned the favour with enthusiasm.

They had been a couple for more than a year, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully well. Her refusal baffled him.

He said: ‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes. I adore you. Thank you for loving me enough to propose marriage.’

That was a bit better. ‘So why won’t you accept?’

‘I don’t want to bring children into a world at war,’ she said.

‘Okay, I can understand that.’

‘Ask me again when we’ve won.’

‘By then I may not want to marry you.’

‘If that’s how inconstant you are, it’s a good thing I refused you today.’

‘Sorry. For a moment, there, I forgot that you don’t understand teasing.’

‘I have to pee.’ She got off the bed and walked naked across the hotel room. Volodya could hardly believe he was allowed to see this. She had the body of a fashion model or a movie star. Her skin was milk-white and her hair pale blonde – all of it. She sat on the toilet without closing the bathroom door, and he listened to her peeing. Her lack of modesty was a perpetual delight.

He was supposed to be working.

The Moscow intelligence community was thrown into disarray every time Allied leaders visited, and Volodya’s normal routine had been disrupted again for the Foreign Ministers’ Conference that had opened on 18 October.

The visitors were the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. They had a hare-brained scheme for a Four-Power Pact including China. Stalin thought it was all nonsense and did not understand why they were wasting time on it. The American, Hull, was seventy-two years old and coughing blood – his doctor had come to Moscow with him – but he was no less forceful for that, and he was insistent on the pact.

There was so much to do during the conference that the NKVD – the secret police – were forced to co-operate with their hated rivals in Red Army Intelligence, Volodya’s outfit. Microphones had to be concealed in hotel rooms – there was one in here, only Volodya had disconnected it. The visiting ministers and all their aides had to be kept under minute-by-minute surveillance. Their luggage had to be clandestinely opened and searched. Their phone calls had to be tape-recorded and transcribed and translated into Russian and read and summarized. Most of the people they met, including waiters and chambermaids, were NKVD agents, but anyone else they happened to speak to, in the hotel lobby or on the street, had to be checked out, perhaps arrested and imprisoned and interrogated under torture. It was a lot of work.